- Hello and welcome, I am Erik Ponder, African and African-American Studies Librarian with MSU Libraries.

I am glad you could join us tonight for this screening and discussion of this evening's episode of Juneteenth Jamboree entitled, From a Free Place to Displace presented by WKAR Public Media and MSU Libraries.

As much as we could love to see you all in person, we are thankful to have this opportunity to connect online, bringing you engaging content while keeping everyone safe.

Before we get started with the discussion, I have a few quick housekeeping notes.

Events like this from WKAR are made possible with support from people like you.

Thank you to those that have donated to WKAR, if you are not a WKAR donor yet you can do so at the Donate to WKAR link on this page or call 517-884-4700 For tonight's discussion, please enter your questions for our panelists into the comment box and I will put them to the panelists as time allows.

Now, it is my pleasure to introduce our panel for tonight.

Dr. Nakia Parker, Assistant Professor of History, Dr. Rashida Harrison, Assistant Professor of Social Relations and Policy at James Madison College, and Chair of Race in the 21st Century America's Conference and finally, Dr. Lisa Barksdale-Shaw, James Madison College's Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy Professor.

Thank you all for joining us.

Such a well done episode on African-American displacement throughout the decades.

There was a great deal of information packed in that 30-minute episode.

My first question to you, I thought we would open the discussion up with your initial thoughts of the episode.

- So thank you for that question, Erik.

And one of the things that really impressed me about the episode was the continuities that were shown between what life was like for newly emancipated people in Texas and the issues that still are there in all the United States today, particularly looking at a city like Austin.

I lived there actually for six years.

I received my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and noticing what kind of city that it was.

It's the largest city in the United States that has a declining population of African-Americans.

And looking at that episode, we see at one point in the 1870s there was a 30% population of African-Americans there and how African-Americans formed freedom colonies and communities and were activists, political activists, social activists, activists for the economic autonomy as well and yet they still face struggles as shown by this episode.

And those struggles still continue today.

So I think that what this episode really shows is that Juneteenth as well as the history of slavery, the repercussions of slavery is not something that is in the past and not something that is relevant but that still affects not only black Americans but also the United States as a whole as well.

- Thank you.

Dr. Harrison.

- Yes, I agree with everything that Dr. Parker just said and so I'll take my... She's a historian, I'll take my policy.

because when I watched it, all I thought about was sort of like, "Well, what does this mean for today?

And one of the things that really stuck out to me was just the conversation around land.

This is something that I'm interested in and it's something that I've actually been doing a lot of research, personal and professional research on.

And this notion, the woman near the end that talked about her father and grandfather and this discussion of, look, if you have land, you always have somewhere to live, you have somewhere to grow.

This is so important, right?

When we think about the legacy of Juneteenth, the legacy of freedom colonies, the legacy of what was promised with emancipation and that legacy that needs to still be fulfilled, right?

So this is something that I've been thinking about already.

So when she said that it just hit home to me, right?

And there's lots of things that came up inside of the documentary including gentrification and things like, which all tie into this notion of black folks being able to have place and space and land that they can grow their families, the economic mobility, the social mobility, the political mobility.

So for me, as I watched it and sort of, watched this rich history, as well as the potential and as well as understood the concerted policies that were done to dismantle those freedom colonies, left me in a place of wondering, "What does this mean for us today as we move forward?"

But yeah, it gave me a lot to think about.

- Dr. Bark.

- Thank you for your wonderful introduction.

I'm really excited about being here on this program with Dr. Parker and Dr. Harrison and of course I embrace their comments as well.

I think what I'm thinking about, or what stood out to me most is the statement made by Doc Jackson, I think from the City Council.

He said you are either at the table or on the menu.

And that statement was very profound and rings so true with the theme of the economic inequities that seem to persist throughout this narrative that we have that circulates around Juneteenth, whether you're talking about Black Wall Street in Tulsa, and this rich array of different men and women who were a part of making a model economic communities, not just in Tulsa but across the nation and the kind of policy-making and laws that kind of that legitimated the illegal and oppressive devastation economically of these these communities across the nation.

And so looking at how those inequities, whether we're talking about red lining, or we're talking about the removal of large swaths of African-American people under the guise of land development seems to me most profound.

And I am really interested in this study discussion of these different acts that were passed whether you're talking about LBJ or you're talking about Brown vs Board of Education and looking at the policy that comes from this legislation, from these court cases, from the highest court in the land, into what they look like on the ground for African-American people historically.

And so I think there is, this documentary brings to the fore many figures that we have yet to talk about or we don't talk about enough and I think it actually puts pressure on some of the figures that we hear most often.

So I'm really excited to hear how this conversation evolves throughout this evening.

- Dr. Parker, you spoke of the decline of African-American population in Austin.

Is there a correlation because of a policy that was enacted towards these communities that's one of the reasons we're seeing the decline?

- Oh, absolutely.

And gentrification is another huge reason why many black folks are being pushed out of Austin.

I believe now it's 8%, Austin is 8% African-American, a steady decline.

And you see once areas that were thriving, where thriving black communities live, particularly East Austin black folks being pushed out, priced out.

And this is not just something happening in Austin, it's happening around the country but you can profoundly see it in Austin how black folks are being pushed out, not having the economic opportunities that we should have.

And yes, it's a direct result from laws that are passed or laws that should be passed and are not.

- Thank you.

So you kind of stole my question for Harrison which is, the story of Austin, Texas is it a microcosm of America?

- Absolutely, right?

That was one of the things that I actually, excuse me.

I appreciated when they gave that definition of gentrification and sort of the lineage of the Gentry.

And Erik, I've been in a space like this with you before and so, one of the things that I often teach about and talk about is the role of capitalism in maintaining oppressive structures here in the United States, right?

So Dr. Parker said, pushed out, priced out, right?

So under the guise of development, in the same way... And this is the lineage, this is the history, this is the legacy of the United States, right?

We are all here on stolen land.

And I think that's really important for us to acknowledge in that space, if we're thinking about land, again, that's where my head is, land, right?

When we're thinking about that, we have to know that that was under the guise of development and building this new... We have this experiment of a country, but there are folk here, we know that.

There were people here and lots of, and we're talking about in the context of African-Americans, lots of us have those ties, right?

Because lots of us have indigenous backgrounds and things like that.

And so this piece of land and being pushed out and priced out absolutely is... Austin as a microcosm of what's happening all over the United States.

But it's also a moment in time of the legacy of this country of pushing, pricing people out, oftentimes in violent ways.

Because even when we talk about gentrification, it's talked about as this sort of social-economic but not the violence that occurs, right?

The violence of displacing people who don't have the same cashflow to be able to buy these properties, that's violent.

So, yeah.

Yes, Erik that's definitely a microcosm as well very telling of the history of this country.

- Dr. Barksdale-Shaw, you mentioned Tulsa, Oklahoma, you mentioned Greenwood.

So I just found this episode also, apropos as we mark 100 years commemoration of the race massacre of 1921.

Would you like to expound on that for a little bit?

- Thank you.

I guess what I returned to is this notion that really that's what Juneteenth to me is at its core, this agency and economic liberation that circulates around the celebration of African-American culture.

And so for me, it's not just about a federal holiday.

This is about agency and what do we do to repair that agency that was stolen, being pushed out, being removed from the table and served on the menu.

And what is it that we have learned in 100 years that gets us back to those models that Dr. Booker T. Washington imagined for Negro Wall Street?

What is it that gets us back to these notions that Ottawa Gurley, and John the Baptist Stradford and Charles W. Green, what gets us back in those 100 years?

How do we get back to the kind of innovation and ingenuity that those communities celebrated, carved out, thought forward generationally even though it was stolen from them.

And I think that one of the things that has remained within the African-American community is that ingenuity.

But I think there's a reticence that also remains when those communities can be so easily decimated, so easily destroyed.

That dreams can be taken and people like those 100-year-old survivors of Tulsa who were left financially decimated as well.

And so I think when I think of Tulsa, I want to figure out, how do we get back to that plan of those model communities and protect those communities and create financial legacy so that the kind of capitalism that we see circulating in other communities for more than a month, or for longer than three weeks in African-American communities, we see our money circulate within our communities only eight hours in a day.

How do we reverse engineer this economic legacy that doesn't leave us destitute and decimated and without the ability to mobilize the kind of agency that these men and women had mounted and just created such inspiring way to think about what our culture looks like at its best in this country because we know we have a legacy outside of this country but I mean, when we're talking about this country - Thank you.

Thank you.

Dr. Parker, when we fast forward to today and especially in the Tulsa, and there was parallels in this episode where in Tulsa, in Greenwood you have a highway that now goes through your Greenwood, you have on the other side Triple-A Baseball Park, and then you have a university.

So there's nothing there now other than this kind of little strip of what they call Black Wall Street.

And it was a similar story in, I believe in Austin in the same phase.

- Yeah, absolutely.

East Austin in particular, as I mentioned before was a thriving place for the black community and it still is to a certain extent, but what you see now in East Austin is tons of high-rise apartments and restaurants and art galleries and apartments and houses, houses that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and apartments that are $2,000, $3,000 a month for a 500 square feet.

Again, so I mentioned being priced out and being pushed out.

There are still vestiges of the black community in East Austin.

And I must say that, the African American community in Austin fights furiously to show that they've been there, they've always been there, and they fight for the people that are that are still there but it's definitely an uphill battle.

And I appreciated what Dr. Barksdale-Shaw mentioned, where she said, even when you see places like Tulsa and they try to decimate the neighborhoods that black folks culture and lives are resilient.

And that's everywhere and that's in Texas too, where you see the pushback not only with black people living in different areas, you see pushback and gentrification, but you also see it even in just teaching African-American history and critical race theory.

We see Texas passing laws such as the 1836 Project.

No, we don't wanna necessarily teach critical race theory and slavery, we wanna teach this wonderful idea of Texas exceptionalism.

And it wasn't until 2019 and this always shocks my students when I tell them this, that it wasn't until 2019 that Texas teachers were allowed to say that slavery was one of the main causes of the Civil War.

So I mentioned all of that, just to show again the uphill battle that African-Americans face in that particular state.

It's not just economic and political and social, it covers a wide variety of aspects that black Americans have to fight against.

- Before I throw out the first audience question, Professor Dr. Harrison, did you wanna respond to that or add anything?

- I'll hold it, I'll hold.

- I saw you- - I did have some reactions, but- (laughs) - Okay, so our first question is from Ruth Cogan, and she asks, what does true urban renewal look like?

Are there communities doing this well?

And I'm just throwing that out to the group here.

(Harrison laughs) - I'll take this, I don't know, I'm sort of thinking about it.

So urban renewal, which is the other side of gentrification or the ways in which folks who want to package it in a way that's acceptable and it just seems like an unfortunate- - By-product.

- Right, by-product of the urban renewal is that poor people get pushed out.

So part of urban renewal and maybe this will take me to some of my reactions earlier, is the acknowledgement of who's there and making the accommodations for those folks to be a part of, and valued, to be seen as an important value to the renewal of the space.

And the ways in which we do that, it's to provide affordable housing.

To make those policies that would make it possible for people to stay and be a part of the building.

And this is where we get into and I'm sure we'll get to this before the conversation, we were talking about this.

When I think about Juneteenth, I think about reparations.

And when I'm talking about reparations, I'm not talking about like, "Send everybody who deserves reparations to check."

That could work.

I'm not saying that what I'm saying is is that it's broader than a check, right?

We're talking about concerted policies that would allow for people to stay where they live.

Or to give them the funds to update the spaces in which they in living.

One of the closest for us here in Michigan and one of the closest conversations that I can think about, we can talk about multiple cities, but I tend to think about Detroit because I teach on Detroit.

And so this is one of the things that is talked about in the context of Detroit.

There's so many great community organizations that are run by black and brown people, that are fighting, that are pushing, that are introducing policies, that are not necessarily being taken up because a lots of people have been pushed out, have been priced out, right?

When we go to downtown Detroit and we look at the great renewal because Detroit has been talked about as... Detroit has come back.

It's supposedly a good case study of urban renewal.

The problem is when you go to downtown Detroit, Detroit was Motown City, which also meant that it was majority black and it still is citywide but downtown Detroit doesn't look that way.

So what happened?

Did we not give contracts to black businesses?

So when we talk about urban renewal, we are talking about making the concerted effort to make sure not just like a little, we give 10% to people.

Because that's what ends up happening in these projects.

Let's save 10% if that high for community folks.

No, it needs to be more than 50%.

This is their home.

And people have ideas.

They need the capital, they need the support, the structural support.

So, yeah.

So when we talk about that, we're talking about a shifting, first of all in the philosophy of what we mean by renewal and that renewal has to include a real strategy for renewal that has to be inclusive of the people that are from this space.

And not having them, seeing them, and valuing them, not their culture, their ideas, and the labor that their family has put into maintaining that space.

- Thank you, thank you.

Dr. Barksdale-Shaw, did you have anything that you wanna add to that?

- Yes, thank you.

Those are beautiful comments, Dr. Harrison and I support all of that.

I think when you asked the question the community that came to mind was Miami Gardens, Florida.

I think there's a lot of, and it's still ongoing, but I think the work that they've been doing in the last 15 years has been really helping to turn that city around to invest in creating a black middle class, trying to make sure they address social policy issues of crime and other kinds of efforts that brings a kind of financial benefit that celebrates African-American financial legacy.

But I agree with Dr. Parker, I mean, there are so many faucets, there's so many layers to how we think about this kind of agency that was modeled by our ancestors through Black Wall Street and Elaine and Rosewood and all of these communities across the country.

And so I think I would do a disservice to your question and to those legacy makers who precede us if I thought in a very limited way about what that looks like.

So I think some of the policies and the ideas that Dr. Harrison mentioned.

Let's not just have this 10% and think that's okay.

We checked the box off to equality with that 10%.

I think we have to innovate, as she said, what renewal looks like because previously it looked like removal.

And we've seen what that looks like historically among our indigenous populations here in this country and indigenous populations, for instance, like in South Africa with the apartheid.

So we have seen that and it has been repeated not just locally, domestically and globally, but we have to be very innovative about what that looks like and I think it has to be very expansive.

And so I'm thinking of creating a larger economic agency.

I think these opportunities that each of my colleagues are talking about.

I think we cannot limit that.

I think that's where we have run into problems previously.

We have been very limited in what equity and what agency and what bringing African-American people and people from the African diaspora to the table.

I think we've been very limited in what that looks like, what we allow that to look like.

And so I think that we must advance more expansive understandings of what economic equity, political equity, i.e power, and what the celebration of culture looks like other than a black history month and a Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

I mean, let's put a real investment in celebrating our people not just their culture and appropriating it and selling it.

And we know how to do capitalism.

We know how to do marketing in this country and so people can take African-American culture and sell it globally.

It's a no-brainer as they say but what about real investment in the people behind the culture and making that something that we also celebrate instead of just checking off boxes.

And I don't know if I've answered your question directly but to me it seems so much more complicated than just one or two things.

And I hope that the person who asked the question, I hope I addressed their issues.

- I have one more question from our audience and this from Tamika and she asks, do you think the initiatives put forward by the Biden administration to bridge the racial wealth gap will work?

That includes a massive increase in federal spending for minority businesses and enforcing anti-discrimination housing regulations.

What do you think will work?

(Rashida laughs) - The what?

From my perspective, yes we need all of those things.

I'm not that optimistic at the moment.

And in part, it's because what Dr. Barksdale-Shaw just talked about in terms of the ways in which, not just black people but minoritized communities.

Like right now let's be frank, right now it is invoke for organizations, institutions to pledge a support of equity, it's invoke.

And it's already started dwindling, right?

That support is already started dwindling with the pandemic, with the George Floyd case.

There was a lots of people that all of a sudden recognized that black lives matter and they didn't realize that before.

And so I think that the initiative needs to and ought to be there.

I can't honestly say that I'm optimistic about it actually bringing a real change.

When we talk about change in this country, particularly around equality, this political, economic, social equality we're talking about the need to restructure the frame of this country and fundamentally, Biden administration is part of the frame of the country in the same way that, Dr. Barksdale-Shaw just mentioned.

So now Juneteenth is a federal holiday.

So what is the federal government actually celebrating?

That's what I would like to know.

And how are they illustrating that they actually understand the legacy of Juneteenth, right?

And this is where I go back to what I mentioned before about reparations.

Like, what are the tangible outcomes of that?

So I wanna know what the tangible outcomes will be for enforcement of... Because it's enforcement of something that already exists.

There's already anti-discrimination laws, right?

So now it's going to be an enforcement.

I don't know what that looks like in the context of this country for minoritized folks.

I just don't.

(Rashida laughs) - Anything to add, Dr. Parker?

- I just think about the...

I'm a historian, the historical precedence of administrations trying economic opportunities and sometimes they have good intentions, sometimes they work for awhile and then it falls to the wayside, or there there's such pushback.

When we see it again, we're talking in the context of Juneteenth and post emancipation.

You have the Freedman's Bureau established by the federal government in 1865.

One of the primary things that it was supposed to do was to help African-Americans economically and in less than a decade, if it was shut down and it wasn't an effective, very effective while it was in place.

And what I think is for the most part, we as black Americans were looking for not only economic opportunities, but economic autonomy, we realize that if we're gonna do it, it has to be done by us within our own communities.

And as Dr. Harrison mentioned, though it's the system that needs fixing and that administration is part of the system.

So unless we think of concrete ways to fix the systemic problems, any programs are really just a bandaid.

- And so you bring me to an excellent wrap up question for the three of you.

And I will start with Dr. Barksdale-Shaw in this wrap up question, and that is, it was pulled from the conclusion of the episode and that is where do we go from here?

And I think you touched upon that just a little bit, Dr. Parker, but we're gonna wrap up there and all three of you get a perspective on that.

- Thank you for this question.

It sounds like this is a question our community has been asking for a long time across several documentaries.

In my opinion, one of the reasons we keep returning to this question is that our prosperity and our despair has been very cyclical where I think Dr. Parker alluded to, or mentioned directly, my apologies.

The reconstruction and so if we have this Civil Rights Act of 1865, we have this reconstruction era where African-American people obtained political power, economic power, land, and the kind of agency that we have yet to repeat since then in many ways.

I think what I would like to see is that there's not a repeat of opportunity and then a removal of that opportunity.

And we've seen that even more recently in recent years, the kind of rolling back of advances across civil liberties in this 21st century moment which is very disturbing to our forefathers and foremothers who fought during the civil rights movement for the very civil liberties that their children and grandchildren have tried to take advantage of.

And so, what it looks like for me is how do we recreate, and I keep going back to this, how do we recreate these opportunities, these communities where we're safe in our agency, to use Dr. Parker's phrase, economic autonomy, to be just left alone, to succeed, to create financial legacy for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to have African-American stores and police forces and other types of businesses that accepts financial and other kinds of relationships with all communities but those dollars, those innovations remain within that community to make that community thrive and connect to larger communities across the country.

So that there's not just this one city, as you asked us, the person who asked the question previously, what does urban renewal look like?

And I was trying to think, "Okay, what does that city, where the mayor, he's no longer mayor now, but he was... Oh yeah, Miami Gardens."

It should not be that hard to think about the several different communities among the 14 plus percent of African-Americans and African diaspora in this country where we've gotten it right.

And I'd like to see that cyclical kind of relationship where there's opportunity and then the opportunities removed or we see a thriving community, let's run a highway through that community.

I like to see something that is in mass that is not in just one place, and we figure out how to do that, not just in local spaces that it becomes something that's truly serves as the model that Dr. Booker T. Washington and Charles Green and all of those foresaw.

The fact that we're 100 years outside of Tulsa and we have yet to repeat the economic experiment that they foresaw is sad to me.

And so slapping another federal holiday on the calendar, that's great.

African-American people were gonna celebrate Juneteenth anyway.

Just putting that out there.

Thank you.

- Dr. Harrison.

- So first, thank you.

I didn't get to say that.

I didn't say that at the beginning.

So thanks, Erik, for inviting me.

Thanks, WKAR.

I'll keep it brief.

We, as in we black folk and allies and other minoritized communities, where we go from here is that we continue pressing, pushing and fighting.

So, I'm a movement scholar, I'm interested in social movements in the way in which we build coalitions and continued to make our own that we continue to do what we've been doing because even in all of this, just there are communities still pushing and fighting against those policies that are there to dismantle, to push us out including the planned rights folks that are building farms.

There's a whole, I'm a black woman who now gardens, this is my side note.

But it's a new thing for me and I'm also realizing that there are so many black women doing this, right?

And for me, it's political, right?

It's part of my politics.

It's part of what I want to instill in my child because that's about knowing how to grow your food, that's autonomy, right?

That's food autonomy.

How do we do that?

So thinking about that autonomy in all these different ways, we keep pushing, we keep struggling, right?

We don't let the cry of Black Lives Matter just fall to the wayside, because it's now sort of it's going out and vote.

We have to keep pushing.

We have to keep being loud.

- And we'll leave the last word for our historian.

(Nakia laughs) - Co-sign, everything back to Harrison and Dr. Barksdale-Shaw said, and where do we go from here?

I also agree with the points that it's not over because Juneteenth is a national holiday.

And we've seen that in the past, "Oh, MLK Day, we're done here."

Or there's this certain narrative that's pushed of Martin Luther King, that he wasn't a radical.

That he just wanted everyone to get along.

Instead, this was a radical activist who wanted a dramatic overhaul of the economic and social system of the United States.

And I don't want Juneteenth to have a similar narrative.

We all came together to celebrate the emancipation of black Americans.

Now, as Dr. Harrison said, we have to still keep struggling, still keep fighting.

And it's no good to have a national holiday if we're not gonna talk about other concrete, discernible ways to fix what's going on here and to address the systemic issues that affect black Americans and other minoritized groups in the United States too.

So not empty words, actions.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

That is all the time we have for tonight.

Thank you to our panelists for your time and contributions to our conversation.

You can watch the full episodes of Juneteenth Jamboree streaming on pbs.org.

We hope you enjoy the presentation.

Stay safe, everyone.

Goodnight.

- Goodnight.

- Goodnight.